Penn State College of the Liberal Arts Department of Applied Linquistics

Kuldip Kaur, Professor with the Faculty of Education and Languages, Open University Malaysia, is visiting as a Fulbright Scholar for Spring 2013.  Her research interests are teacher education in ESL as well as language policy in Malaysia. This semester she will be co-teaching APLNG 572 Communication in L2 Classrooms with Professor Karen E. Johnson.

Jesús García Laborda is an associate professor at Universidad de Alcala (Madrid, Spain). Dr Garcia Laborda has a PhD in English Philology and an EdD in Language Education. His current research covers many areas of computer implementations for language learning and testing along with ESP and teacher training : (i) especial applications of low stakes online testing, especially focused to the Spanish University Entrance Examination for concepts such as washback, test design, beliefs, emotions, etc. This also includes the study of interface and computer architecture in other languages and their evaluation and assessment; ii) it includes practical applications of mobile learning for commercial purposes to help to introduce a computer based test in high stakes exams as DELE (Spanish) or the Spanish University Entrance Examination (English, French, German; (iii) the implications of implementing such test in teacher training along with more traditional approaches to teacher education and their development of both cognitive and computer skills.

Dr. Chunyan Wang, Lecturer with the School of Foreign Languages at Shanghai Jiaotong University in Shanghai, China, is visiting for 2013. She conducts research in corpus linguistics, computer-assisted language learning, and second language acquisition. Her current study concerns the use of collocations by Chinese learners of English and data-driven learning (DDL).

Dr. Asel Shayakhmet, associate professor of Linguistics at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University in Almaty (Kazakhstan), visited as a fellow of the Junior Faculty Development Program (JFDP) by the U.S. Department of State. Dr. Shayakhmet's conducts research on psycholinguistic and sociolinguistics aspects of primary school age children’s bilingualism and on the teaching of English to speakers of Kazakh.

Dr. Maria Helena Vieira Abrahão, professor of Applied Linguistics at the São Paulo State University (UNESP) in São José do Rio Preto (Brazil), visited during fall 2011. Dr. Abrahão's research focuses on foreign language teaching and teacher education.

Dr. Hina Ashraf, assistant professor in the Dept. of Humanities at the Air University in Islamabad (Pakistan), visited as a Fulbright Scholar. Dr. Ashraf conducts research in critical linguistics and education practices that are affected by the language of schooling. A recent set of her studies focuses on the current national debate about language in education policy and practice in Pakistan.